Their brains broken by the cognitive dissonance of worshiping a country governed by someone who represented everything they fear and loathe, American right-wingers completely snapped and embraced the nihilistic spectacle of President Donald Trump. Much ink has since been dedicated to the question: Why? Here’s a couple of drops: Because Trump does to liberals and minorities exactly what they thought Obama did to conservatives. Politics has become a realm of purely spiteful grievance. The only way out of this state of gibbering resentment is a positive vision, one that reconciles the concept of “America,” which right-wingers hold sacred, and the fetid reality of multiculturalism and moral decay they see all around them. This vision is currently the one being promoted by the nascent white nationalist movement, which recognizes that the only way for America to conform to the glittering homeland they see in their heads is for the minorities and leftists and liberals and (((media types))) to be driven from the land. Only then, in a country re-founded on blood and soil, will the Starbucks barista write “Cool Dude” on your cup without rolling her eyes.
Remember—and remember well—that anyone who tries to feed you a line about how Donald Trump is not a “real” conservative is absolutely full of shit or is trying to sell you the next big lie. Trump represents everything that this vicious and corrupt project has valorized and promoted for the last forty years, and what’s more, the disasters of right-wing governance have created a country exactly as stupid and desperate as the one that actually elected a buffoon like him. The problem Trump now presents for the conservative intelligentsia is that he’s simply too much like the hogs who’ve been lapping up the slop of conservative ideology for decades and not enough like the undead ghouls who’ve been ladling it out. Since he has absolutely no intellectual foundation, he lacks initiation in the rites, rituals, and codes that have allowed previous conservatives to present themselves as thoughtful.
So strap in, folks. This is only the beginning. Trump himself, with his Heritage Foundation brain trust and Goldman Sachs cabinet, may look like a creampuff compared to the next generation of Republican demagogues who take the bloodthirsty, nativist, white-power ideology far more seriously.
I. Deborah Solomon, “Of Manliness and Men,” New York Times Magazine, March 12, 2006.
II. Ayn Rand, “Screen Guide for Americans,” The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, 1947, http://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/screenguideamericans.pdf.
III. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 218.
IV. “I think God made all people good, but if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?” Pat Buchanan, quoted in E. J. Dionne Jr., “Is Buchanan Courting Bias?” Washington Post, February 29, 1992.
V. Francis X. Clines, “Appearing Nightly: Robert Dornan, Master of the Put-Down,” New York Times, June 27, 1995.
VI. Black people.
VII. Jonathan Martin and Amie Parnes, “McCain: Obama Not an Arab, Crowd Boos,” Politico, October, 10, 2008.